I've been doing some home brewing with root beer extracts and I'm ready to move on to experimenting with my own recipes, but I'm having a really tough time finding extracts.

The recipes in the Stephen Cresswell book call for fresh roots, but I'd be happy to find good extracts, preferably all natural (given no other option I'd even settle for artificial if the flavors were accurate).

For aromatic herbs and spices such as wintergreen and star anise, it is usually most economical to use essential oils and not extracts. It is important that the essential oils be FOOD GRADE or USP. For non-aromatic herba such as sarsaparilla and licorice, I recommend dried herbs and not extracts. You can find online sources by googling.

For sassafras, you may have to use the dried herb because sassafras oil is a controlled substance in the USA. You may be able to buy sassafras oil in another country, but if customs catches you, you might go to jail.

OK, I found some licorice root. There are no local sources for food grade essential oils and I'm not having a lot of luck on the internet (at least determining which ones are food grade). Do you know a good one-stop supplier for food grade essential oils? Also, I'm starting to lean toward wintergreen over sassafras and sarsaparilla, if those prove too elusive.

Can you tell me about the quality of the Loranoils' wintergreen? The stuff I just got from American Spice was terrible. It had a nauseating (non-wintergreen-like) smell that completely overpowered the flavor and made it unusable in a beverage. Very disappointing.

Can you tell me about the quality of the Loranoils' wintergreen? The stuff I just got from American Spice was terrible. It had a nauseating (non-wintergreen-like) smell that completely overpowered the flavor and made it unusable in a beverage. Very disappointing.

Kellan

I have never tried Loranoils' wintergreen, but I have tried wintergreen oils from different sources and there was practically no variablity. I suspect that your expectations may be incorrect. Essential oils, in general, and wintergreen, in particular, are very strong and must be greatly diluted for food use. Wintergreen oil should be diluted at around 1 drop per gallon of water. It is important that you read detailed instructions here:

Thanks for that feedback. I had no trouble with the sassafras, licorice or anise oils I tried but the wintergreen, at 1 drop in 8 oz of water, produced almost no flavor, but a repulsive formaldehyde-like odor.

I was mixing it by spoon, so perhaps I need to use a blender to judge better. Or an emulsifier like alcohol. Am I correct in understanding that gum arabic can also be used as an emulsifier to dissolve oils into water?

I think I'll try dissolving some oils into a bit of Everclear. That's what the local brew pub told me they use to emulsify oils for their birch beer. When I asked about alcohol content in the final product they said it works at low enough quantities that their sodas have a lower alcohol content than orange juice. But they couldn't give me a rule of thumb as to how much I should use, since they always brew in very large batches. Any idea?

OK, I've made a couple of batches from scratch now. The first wasn't bad, but gave me enough information to make a pretty tasty second brew. The LorAnn oils seem to be good quality. I repent of my complaints about the wintergreen from AmericanSpice. As aruzinsky indicated, wintergreen oil is just so potent that I wasn't getting the true flavor because I was trying to use way too much.

I blended the oils in a little water with some gum arabic and a glycerin-based vanilla extract and they seemed to disperse well. Force-carbonating at 30 psi provided a good fizz and the gum arabic made for a nice, foamy head.

Please bear with me....I've been reading some of the older posts trying to find which essential oils I may want to purchase to fine tune my root beer recipe. This post lists some oils and some links to purchse them, but I have never purchased or used oils, and I have some additional questions:

1. What are the main oils should I be looking for? This post mentions Anise, Star Anise, Clove, Ginger, Juniper Berry, Nutmeg, Wintergreen, and then also Birch, and Corriander.

2. The lorannoils website has choices af Ess Oil, Flavor, or Oil Natural Is there a preference of one?

3. In a different post, (was it aruzinsky?) that mentions adding 2 drops wintergreen oil, 1/2 drop allspice oil, & 1/4 drop anise oil to Big K Red Cream Soda. How can I find allspice oil, and - This may be a dumb question, but how do you add a 1/2 or 1/4 drop?

Please bear with me....I've been reading some of the older posts trying to find which essential oils I may want to purchase to fine tune my root beer recipe. This post lists some oils and some links to purchse them, but I have never purchased or used oils, and I have some additional questions:

1. What are the main oils should I be looking for? This post mentions Anise, Star Anise, Clove, Ginger, Juniper Berry, Nutmeg, Wintergreen, and then also Birch, and Corriander.

2. The lorannoils website has choices af Ess Oil, Flavor, or Oil Natural Is there a preference of one?

3. In a different post, (was it aruzinsky?) that mentions adding 2 drops wintergreen oil, 1/2 drop allspice oil, & 1/4 drop anise oil to Big K Red Cream Soda. How can I find allspice oil, and - This may be a dumb question, but how do you add a 1/2 or 1/4 drop?

Any help would be appreciated.

1. Yes.

2. Only use essential oils sold for food use, at least, when serving to other people. For personal use, use other grades completely at your own risk. Most "flavor oils" are artificial flavors without any kind of standardization therefore there is ample opportunity for the manufacturer to cheat the buyer. In fact, the strawberry and raspberry flavor oils that I last purchased from Loran were less than 1/10 th the strength of the same flavors that I previously purchased from Loran. I will not buy flavor oils from Loran again.

2. E.g, to get approximately 1/4 drop, dilute 1 drop with 39 drops of alcohol and add 10 drops of the mixture to whatever. And, I am not suggesting that you throw the other 3/4 drops away. Anyway, you should use a carrier solvent such as alcohol to facilitate dissolution in water.